Literacy in Black South Africa during the Apartheid Era
Mkhize, Dumisile
>>SPEAKER: What's your name?
>>DUMISILE: I'm Dumisile Mkhize from South Africa.
>>SPEAKER: And what's your narrative about?
>>DUMISILE: It's basically about how I learned to read and write but I take it further almost up to here where I am now. Of course I don't talk about everything but I do highlight some of what I consider important. So for me, learning to read and write was - when you come to think about it in terms of what you hear people in this country were talking about, it was very, very different for me and for many South Africans who grew up during the Apartheid era in South Africa. It was different in a sense that we weren't really exposed to books or reading and writing; there wasn't any material for that even though we had our own little cities. We had Toros, Donatelli, which was very vibrant and very common when I grew up but I don't remember, before I went to school, I honestly don't remember having someone reading a book to me. I don't remember sitting down or going to the library, in the first place we didn't have libraries because I came from a system that was meant to deprive black people of any form of education. So any preparation with students from other countries like reading, children's literature, having some people read to them and going to the library to get some books - we didn't have that. It's not me, it's everyone in the community where I grew up. So when you went to school, for the most part and for most of us, learning to read and write was something that you actually learned at school and even then it was difficult because we had big classes. In a class you would find about thirty or even fifty students; you can't imagine how to address everyone's needs if you have about fifty students. So it was really tedious for us and for our teachers I guess. So we did learn to write and for the most part what we learned were basic skills. I don't really remember writing in a way that spoke to my voice. We did a lot of spelling, we did a lot of dictation which was considered as part of writing development. But there was out of context as a result most of us never really learned to write in a meaningful way. We had acquired the basic mechanical skills regarding how to write but I don't think we really knew how to use it as a tool to learn differently as a tool to talk about ourselves in a meaningful way and in a way that connected to who we were. So learning to write and read was a struggle for most of us because even when we went to school there weren't sufficient books. Sometimes there weren't books at all so you can imagine how do you learn to read and write when you don't have materials to do so. It reminds me, a few weeks ago I read an article, this is an academic article, where this particular author was comparing people who learned to read and write without material as people learning to play soccer without the ball itself. I like that metaphor and it stayed with me because I could actually see myself in what the writer was saying but this is basically what we did. Another thing that happened with us when we learned to write was we were never given a chance of choosing our own topics. What really happened is the teacher would come to class, I suppose on Friday, and give you a topic you know nothing about. You can imagine if someone gives you a topic like learning to write about a journey by train, gosh, I've never been on a train! How am I going to write about it when you don't know? Some of us didn't know what trains looked like so it was real difficult for most of us. So we would take the topic and go home, Saturday do other things, and then on Sunday evening, sometime late in the evening - by the way we had homework so we start writing down whatever came to our mind and for the most part we never went back to read through what we've written. So in retrospect I feel like what we did, we just submitted a first draft, which in itself was full of mistakes because we never really looked at it. In other words, what I'm trying to say is we never learned about writing as a process. Again, I don't want to blame my teachers because they didn't know any better themselves so it was the whole system that was crumbling and it allowed most students, most of us to pass through those cracks because they were big cracks to be honest. Some of us survived and we are here trying to finish our degrees, in a way we did survive. What I meant was when I became a teacher myself, because I trained as a teacher for English as a second language, I trained at the time when there was a move from an oriented teaching approach to a communicative approach. So we did learn about how to have students to communicate in meaningful and purposeful ways. So there was a handful but I still don't remember that we got to writing in particular. I don't remember that we actually learned about writing as a process. If we did it was something that was mentioned in passing. For me what you have to understand is the process of writing is when I actually moved to CI, the Department of Curriculum Instruction, I actually have focused on how to teach reading and writing. We did a lot of reading and talking about it so I came to a better understanding of what it means to write and that kind of opened new doors for me in terms of improving my own writing skill. So it's been a process and it's still a process and it's going to be a process for me to reach a stage where I can actually say - I'm not sure even if I will ever reach that stage because even people you consider as seasoned writers, they still tell you that they're still learning about writing. The good thing is that for the most part I think I'm at a stage where I understand what it means to write whether one is talking about creative writing or contemporary writing; I think I'm at that point where the basic understanding helps me with my own work and with other people's work. Of course I'm planning to be a professor and to work in a research institute, which means I will have to write, it helps me to sharpen my own writing skills that I'll be using almost on a daily basis.
>>SPEAKER: Can you talk a little bit more about other literacy practices? In your other narrative you talked about learning English and learning Zulu and can you talk a little bit about that too, the process of learning these different languages?
>>DUMISILE: My native language is Zulu. When I went to school for the most part we didn't really know English, we didn't know any other language, because when I went to school during the time we went to school most of us in the 70's and 80's, we had an official language policy with English and African as official languages which meant that we learned those languages at school; we were supposed to learn those languages. What happened is I think in grade one, two, and three for the most part we learned our African languages; we have several of them. So you'd learn your native African language, you'd learn it as a subject and use it as a medium of instruction. In the meantime we also learned some English orally; we didn't really write it at that time. As we moved on to the third grade where we started using a lot of English and at that time we also were introduced to African, which is another language, which meant that we were basically learning three languages all at the same time. The only difference perhaps was that we were already fluent in Zulu but we still had to learn how to read and write it, so in a way we were learning that language. The other two languages that we also were exposed to were languages that we actually never - not never - but we knew that there was African, we knew there was English, but we didn't have exposure to those languages; we were told but there wasn't exposure. Especially because we didn't have TV's then and all the media outlets that were there were not accessible and so that really made them sound like foreign languages. Given the fact that we grew up in an era where different racial and ethnic groups were segregated, that made it even more difficult because there was no interaction between us as natives because of African languages and native speaks of African and English. So there wasn't any form of input that we could say we got from peers because as black people you went to your own schools and not only did you go to those schools as black people but you had to stick to your ethnic group. So like we have several of them; as a Zulu-speaking child I went to a Zulu-speaking school because I was living in the Zulu-speaking area. We didn't really benefit that much from the richness of our country because of the segregation. It was a very unfortunate situation but it was difficult for the most part of learning to read and write especially when it comes to English. African was never popular and in fact most of us didn't even bother if you learned African but we were somehow concerned about learning English, we were very much concerned about that because we knew that it offered people a kind of social and economic mobility. So learning the languages wasn't easy for us. We didn't have structures that were set up to support the linguistic diversity which would have been a rich resource for us and for our teachers as well.
>>SPEAKER: Were your teachers black or white?
>>DUMISILE: They were black, yes, teachers were black. They were black because that was a crazy system. Schools had to be black, everyone had to be black. We had black schools, white schools, Indian schools, and we had colored schools and in South Africa we make a distinction between people of mixed race and people who look like they have no mixed blood, like myself. So we qualify ourselves as blacks and then those who have mixed blood, we called them coloreds and then we have Indians and Whites. So no, there was no interaction of any sort. So we learned those languages from teachers who, themselves, were not native speakers of the languages and to some extent that was problematic because for the most part you learn any language better if you're taught by a native speaker of that language. That was not the case because the system was not set up that way.
>>SPEAKER: Thank you, do you have any other thoughts that come to mind concerning literacy, reading, and writing?
>>DUMISILE: I think this is encouraging for me. I haven't been to the classroom for quite some time - classrooms like primary and secondary and so on - but from what I've been reading and what I've heard it is encouraging that teachers and students seem to be employing methods that I think will help them to be better readers and writers. Again, because the system has opened up compared to what we got as students. It's really encouraging and I'm looking forward to opportune my research in reading and writing and so forth because sometime it's there. So I'm looking forward to see how we have evolved as a country in terms of language and literacy practices, particularly reading and writing literacies. I'm really looking forward to see how I will do in it.
>>SPEAKER: Thank you.
>>DUMISILE: Ok, thank you.